Crowd sourcing, also referred to as crowdsourcing, is a concept in which an entity reaches out to the collective capabilities of the public at large to complete tasks that the entity would otherwise perform itself or outsource to another party. One appeal of crowd sourcing is free labor. However, more importantly, crowd sourcing enables entities to increase the useful talent pool for a particular task, and rely on people who have an interest in the given tasks. As such, crowd sourcing has expanded to many social and commercial areas, including authoring, scientific endeavors, social bookmarking, map generations, creating video collections, and the like. For example, one of the most popular authoring concepts for crowd sourcing is online encyclopedia entitled “WIKIPEDIA”.
Crowd sourcing is typically performed by online communities, which submit information to solve the given tasks. The communities also attempt to find the best solutions, sometimes for recognition, monetary rewards, or other forms of compensation. However, crowd sourcing has raised criticism for numerous reasons. For example, crowd sourcing does not necessarily provide quality results, sometimes due to personal biases or lack of experience by the people in the crowd coursing communities.
Current crowd source map creation allows any person to upload information to add to a corpus of knowledge, such as adding a new trail or road to a corpus map. Furthermore, some people may have privileges that allow them to modify, update, correct, or delete information previously uploaded by themselves or others. However, generating and increasing accuracies for crowd-sourced maps can be time consuming, tedious, and may be dependent on the accuracies of the information provided (e.g., GPS waypoints). As such, there is a need for methods for increasing accuracies positional routes (e.g., roads, trails, paths, tracks, etc. . . . ) in crowd-sourced map databases that are easy to use and that provide quality estimates.